Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

I’ve been roaming in the wonderful world of OpenGL and I’m super close to making a really nice library that I’ll be able to use for the compo!

However, I am in need of some help. If anyone has experience with LWJGL/OpenGL and some free time, I’d really appreciate it.

I’ve been having problems using Vertex Buffer Objects. because the system throws an exception saying “Cannot use offsets when array buffer object is disabled” whenever I try to call glPointer operations. (See line ~845)

I’m clueless as to what this means, being that there is no GL Enum called ARRAY_BUFFER_OBJECT. Any help on what it might mean or what I’ve coded wrong would be nice.

Also, I’ve been having problems with FrameBuffer objects. They never seem to render to anything at all. The class is at line ~1355

I’m pretty sure it’s within the Three.GL.FrameBuffer class, but I can’t seem to find the problem.

Yes, the class is called “Three” until I can think of something better.

To use the library, just copy the class file into your game, create a class that implements Three.GameObject, then call create(params), defineGameObject(GameObject), and start() to begin.

Three.GL houses all kinds of shortcuts for OpenGL, Three.AL does the same for OpenAL, and Three.Util is a little module I’ve created for containing anything that I might find useful.

Yep, that’s right. It turns out I don’t really know my libraries well enough at all. It should work, but it doesn’t. I should’ve known this would happen, especially considering that I’ve only known these libraries for less than a month.

I’m not entirely sure if I should keep going or switch to Java2D (really don’t want to do that) or even just quit. Maybe an idea will come to me later in the day, but for now, I’m probably out.

Well, it’s that time of year again! I can already taste (or smell?) the code in the air! This competition I’ll be using a new skill set that I’ve acquired since the last competition (August 24).

My Tools:

-Java

-Eclipse IDE

-SFXR

-Paint.NET

My Libraries:

-LWJGL (OpenGL, OpenAL, etc..)

-Slick_Util.jar (OpenGL textures, BufferedImageUtil)

-LWJGL_Util (GLUPerspective)

Speaking of Ludum Dare, I never got around to writing a Post-Mortem entry after the competition, so here it is:

Overview:

At the time I didn’t have much knowledge of font or 3D, so I used my knowledge of Java2D. I ended up encountering many problems during the competition due to my lack of experience (I had just started to learn java, my first programming language, in May). The first 5 hours were pretty mundane, with a lot of utility coding to handle buffered images and AWT frames, but I managed to create a fully functional game base code that served me well throughout the competition. After that, I started work on the game environment. The only problem was, I hadn’t much thought of an idea so I really had to go off of what I had in my mind at the time, which was a classic osmosis type of game style (which was the only thing I could think of with a theme like evolution). A little while into coding, I realized I didn’t exactly think of the most memory efficient way to implement this (a 5000 pixels square image) and I ran out of memory. I panicked, and quickly simplified the idea into a type of board game, which turned out to be too complex to code in the remaining time. In the last 10 hours, I finally just decided to create a simple remix of conway’s game of life to turn it into an actual game. Because this idea was a lot more fun to play than I expected and because I was placed 95th in innovation, I considered it to be a good competition overall.

Things that went right:

-The final idea that I came up with turned out to be pretty fun and creative

-While slightly flawed, I wrote some pretty good base code that reduced the amount of repetition required

-I used a language that supported all platforms, so I didn’t have to make an effort to port the game (except to fix bugs on mac’s demented JVM release)

-I wrote a pretty cool AI to challenge the player

Things that went wrong:

-I tried to implement too many mechanics into one idea

-I disregarded all boundaries of the java virtual machine and created tons of memory leaks

-Throughout my program, I wrote some pretty inefficient code that cost me some time

-I was new to coding, so I had to debug pretty much everything I wrote

Overall:

Because of the final product’s innovation, challenge, and creativity, along with it’s fairly good ranking , I considered this competition a success.

Photos:

-My Lunch, consisting of home-made macaroni and cheese,

along with a mixture of orange juice and mountain dew (which

tasted pretty interesting), and my coding station for the duration of the

I’m currently in the process of making a very simple, basic, and powerful scripting language that would make the development of 2D games easy for new programmers and speedy for experienced ones. It will use the Java virtual machine to run and will not require any other software installations. There won’t be objects, but there will be some primitive types including float, long, sound, image, and boolean. The language will slightly resemble Scratch by MIT, but will only need one document of code to create a program. Also, there are no fixed objects or drag-and-drop features. It’s in the super early stages of development right now, so there’s nothing much to show. I’m really hoping to get a working prototype by the end of the year though, so wish me luck!

Well, due to physical memory reasons, it seems I have to change my idea. I’m thinking maybe some type of board-game format with a similar idea as my original one. Because of this, I’ve ended up wasting 2 hours .

I have a very good amount of art done for it and I should be done by the deadline tomorrow.